The Love Songs of WEB Dubois (2021) by Honore Jeffers

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Love Songs of WEB Dubois (2021) 

by Honore Jeffers 

Eatonton, Georgia

Georgia 10/26

  I love a writer with some ambition, even if I don't love the book.  That's the case here with The Love Songs of WEB Dubois, a debut novel with some gusto written by author/professor Honore Jeffers.  It would be fair to call this book "over-stuffed" in that it covers multiple generations (and multiple characters within each generation) of a mixed-race but basically African-American family that has done well in 19th and 20th century Georgia without getting into any trouble.   The main protagonist is Ailey Pearl Garfield, one of three sisters and the daughter of a medical doctor and his wife.   She is pretty clearly a stand-in for the author herself, as her experiences and physical description mirror that of the author. 

 

  At 816 pages, the plot resembles something like a 19th century Russian novel written by Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy but the subject matter is distinctly modern, with a strong current of child-sexual abuse and its consequences running through the family from start to finish.  I thought The Love Songs of WEB Dubois wasn't perfect, but it was interesting, and it will certainly be a top 5 book from Georgia and top 10 for the Chapter (Georgia/Florida/Louisiana/Alabama/Mississippi). 

Kira-Kira (2004) by Cynthia Kadohata

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Kira-Kira (2004)

by Cynthia Kadohata

Chesterfield, Georgia

Georgia: 9/26

   Kira-Kira is a YA book about the experiences of a Japanese-immigrant family living and working in rural Georgia.  In some ways Kira-Kira is different than the vast amount of immigrant struggle narratives in the 1,001 Books project, in that the family here works hard and doesn't spend the entire book complaining about how hard it is to be an immigrant in America, which, if you take the books in this project as the sample-set, constitutes about 90% of the immigrant experience.   It is similar in that, like other books told from the perspective of a young child, the protagonist doesn't go anywhere or do anything for the most part, just sits around and thinks about her family circumstances.    The benefit of that approach in the context of this particular project is that the narrator in these situations has plenty of time to slowly meander through whatever American setting is involved.  Here, it's rural Georgia, which is on no one's list of top places to visit.   At least the racism and discrimination experienced by this Japanese immigrant family is leavened by their unfamiliarity to locals.